Foreign Guest Workers Increasing under Trump, Say Fed Data

REUTERS/Chip East20 Jun 2017Washington, D.C.

President Donald Trump’s administration has seen increases in the number of foreign workers entering the U.S., according to new federal statistics.

Numbers from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) show that in the Trump Administration’s first three months in office, the number of foreign workers who were given permission to enter the U.S. increased by nearly 25,000 compared to the same time last year under the Obama Administration.

Between January and March 2016, Obama admitted more than 112,000 foreign guest workers. In 2017, Trump allowed close to 137,000 foreign workers to enter the country.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of foreign workers are given permission by the federal government to enter the U.S. through a variety of non-immigrant foreign guest worker visas, including the H-1B, L-1, AH-2A, and H-2B visas.

Often, Americans are fired and replaced by foreigners, as companies can pay the foreign replacement a lesser salary under the visas rules. This has left millions of Americans displaced as they see their jobs eventually transferred to a foreign nation.

This year, the Department for Professional Employees estimated how foreign workers continue to increase in a multitude of American industries:

Guest workers are highly concentrated in STEM occupations. Guest workers were 14.2 percent of the computer and mathematical science workforce in the United States; 6.7 percent of the architecture and engineering workforce; and 10.5 percent of the life, physical, and social science workforce in 2016. Further, guest workers made up 24.9 percent of software developers, 13.3 percent of computer programmers, 17.4 percent of computer hardware engineers, 20.6 percent of computer and information research scientists, and 14.6 percent of mathematicians, statisticians and miscellaneous math occupations in the United States in 2016. The highest concentration of guest workers in STEM occupations was among medical scientists and life scientists where guest workers were 28.5 percent of the workforce in 2016. [35] All of these guest workers are employed under a variety of skilled worker visas, including the B, H-1B, L-1, L-2, O, and OPT.

Though the Trump Administration campaigned against the H-1B visa, which is responsible for a number of lay-offs of American workers at Disney, IBM and Carnival Corporation, it is possible that his administration had little control over the increase in foreign workers.